Jan Vlk

Autonomous Systems Researcher

PhD student in Cybernetics & Robotics @ CTU Prague
Building perception systems for autonomous agents

6+ Years in robotics

4 Competition podiums

12 Projects

News & Updates

Sep 2026 Award

1st Place at Robotour 2026 — Our team won the main category of the international outdoor robot competition in Prague’s Stromovka, with me as the main integrator of the robot’s navigation pipeline.

Jun 2026 Education

Finished NPFL139 course — Completed the Deep Reinforcement Learning course at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University.

Sep 2025 Award

2nd Place at Robotour 2025 — Our team placed 2nd in the international outdoor robot competition with an autonomous beer-delivery robot.

Jun 2025 Research

Started PhD at CTU VRAS Group — Joined the Vision for Robotics and Autonomous Systems group, focusing on physics-guided learning for terrain-aware robot navigation.

Jan 2025 Publication

Master's thesis published — Unsupervised Approaches for 4D Panoptic Segmentation in LiDAR Driving Scenes. Introduces FlowSeg4D, achieving LSTQ 46.9 on SemanticKITTI without supervision. Read more →

Robotic Systems

Control algorithms for autonomous robot navigation based on predicted terrain properties

Autonomous Driving

Real-world LiDAR processing for object detection and tracking in all driving environments

Computer Vision

Multi-sensor fusion combining LiDAR, cameras, and depth sensors for robust perception

My Journey

BSc Cybernetics & Robotics

2020 - 2023

Czech Technical University
Thesis: Autonomous Road Crossing with a Mobile Robot

Porsche Engineering Student Contest

2022

2nd Place
Developed software for an autonomous model car

MSc Cybernetics & Robotics

2023 - 2025

Czech Technical University
Thesis: Unsupervised Approaches for 4D Panoptic Segmentation in LiDAR Driving Scenes

Robotour

2025

2nd Place
Autonomous robotic beer delivery

Researcher and PhD student

2025 - Present

Czech Technical University
Control of autonomous agents based on terrain properties

Robotour

2026

1st Place
Main category, main integrator of the navigation pipeline

Technical Expertise

Core Languages

Python C++ LaTeX ROS2 Bash MATLAB

Computer Vision

PyTorch Open3D OpenCV

Tools & Platforms

Linux Vim Git Docker Gazebo NVIDIA Jetson

Current Research

Dissertation

Physics-Guided Learning for Machine Control
Control of autonomous robots based on terrain properties obtained through perception and physics-informed neural networks

PyTorch ROS2 Open3D Docker

Research Project

Outdoor Autonomous Robotics
Topics tied to autonomous operation in outdoor environments, such as semantic segmentation, navigation, localization, ...

C++ Python NVIDIA Jetson HPC

Open Source

Online Monitoring
Software for online monitoring of deployed robots

And Much More
Almost everything I develop is available under an open-source license

Python JavaScript CI/CD Documentation

Personal Interests

Sports

Competitive dancer • Amateur runner, climber, tennis player, ...

Photography

Amateur photographer & videographer

Travel

I love to travel • Visited 15+ countries both for work and pleasure

Open to collaboration

I'm always interested in collaborating on autonomous systems research, whether it's joint publications, open source projects, or industry applications.

Explore my projects Get in touch